CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
24 September 2007
Implementation Investments
New Zealand King Salmon Implements Sopheon's Accolade® System to Boost Innovation and Product Development
Sopheon announced that its Accolade product life cycle management system has been successfully implemented by the New Zealand King Salmon Company Ltd., one of the largest producers of farmed salmon in the world. The deployment includes users in research and development, operations, marketing and finance at corporate headquarters in Nelson, New Zealand. Accolade is enabling the company to maximize the productivity of its new product development programs by improving idea management and by automating its Stage-Gate® based product innovation process and portfolio management procedures.
Aquaculture, which includes the farming of salmon, is the fastest growing category of protein production for human consumption. During the past twenty years, the industry's annual growth rate has averaged 42 percent. As more and more producers are drawn to the market, the challenge of product commoditization is increasingly critical, and salmon producers in particular have responded by developing business strategies aimed at driving product line diversification and innovation.
New Zealand King Salmon manufactures an extensive range of value-added products under the Regal, Seasmoke and Southern Ocean brands. "Our goal is to avoid the commodity trap so many primary producers fall into," said Don Everitt, general manager of sales and marketing for New Zealand King Salmon Company. "We decided long ago that we need to make our products noticeably different from our competitors while getting closer to consumers and filling needs in their lifestyle. We have always been an innovative company, and designing better products has been fundamental to our success. We believe that the use of Accolade to support our Stage-Gate process will assist us in screening new ideas, building strong business cases and proceeding with the development, design, testing and launch of new products. We are proud to be the first purchaser of this application in New Zealand."
"We chose Accolade because of its user friendly nature and the fact it demands every new product idea be scrutinised with the same metrics and rigor," said Richard Smith, technical manager for New Zealand King Salmon Company. "Given our salmon's tremendous versatility, we're not short of ideas. Accolade assists by comparing metrics on each project enabling the portfolio of projects to be ranked with ease. The result is that weak projects are prevented from progressing through the innovation process and competing for resources which may hold up those ideas with greater potential, thereby making the portfolio overall more productive."
Sopheon partner, Sopheon Asia Pacific, was responsible for the sale, implementation and support of Accolade at New Zealand King Salmon Company. Andrew Carmody, General Manager of Sopheon Asia Pacific, said, "Accolade has allowed New Zealand King Salmon to quickly define and implement an automated new product development process. That process is based on best practices, but it is molded to New Zealand King Salmon's own way of working. It enables them to identify the ideas with the greatest commercial promise, and to focus key resources on developing those ideas and getting them to market."
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